The Product Hunt Effect: SocialSign.in on June 10th, 2014

On June 5th, 2014, I stood on a stage in front of investors, mentors, colleagues, friends and family for Techstars Demo Day. It was the culmination of a 3-month accelerator experience that helped us grow our network density and strengthen our team. I shared our long-term strategy to bring a smarter WiFi solution to every business and venue, along with the progress we made to date. The big picture of SocialSign.in resonated with a “Sent from my iPhone” crowd, especially when they realized they’d never have to ask for a WiFi password again.

5 days later, at 8:52 in the morning, an unexpected ripple effect of that presentation found its way to my inbox. It arrived in the form of an email from Gozde Askay, co-founder of Salary Fairy.

As it turns out, she was one of the hundreds of people in the Demo Day crowd and was very interested in what we were doing. In addition to being a founder herself, Gozde was an early adopter to Product Hunt and active member of the community. She voted often, for products like Shout, Nostalgia Machine, Plated, Hemingway, and the new Google Analytics app for iOS. She also had privileges to submit new products to the site.

That morning she submitted SocialSign.in, unbeknownst to us, and as they say…the rest is history.

On June 10, 2014, SocialSign.in was the #1 daily product on www.producthunt.com

It was an amazing feeling to watch SocialSign.in climb the daily leaderboard. We had 8 votes at 9:22 AM. As we gained steam throughout the day and I engaged in a dialogue with the comments we received, our marketing manager researched the historical results of previous submissions. Turns out it was a rare feat to eclipse 100 votes, but one I had a feeling we’d accomplish.

When it was all said and done at Midnight EST, SocialSign.in was the top product for June 10th with 158 votes.

By the next night we were at 186 votes, #2 all time at that moment, and today we sit proudly at 197. It was an awesome way to keep our growth accelerated just a few days after Techstars came to an end. A month later, that’s still good enough for the all time top ten, among 5,000+ other submissions to the site. Given the growing popularity of Product Hunt and its admission into the latest Y-Combinator class, we’ll see how long that lasts.

The Product Hunt All-Time Top 10 as of July 23, 2014

As important and impressive as the numbers were on producthunt.com, we were even more impressed with numbers over the next 48 hours on our site.

I’m a data driven person in general and usually quantify anything before calling it a success, but the effect Product Hunt had for SocialSign.in goes beyond the numbers. As someone who loves (and builds) products, I believe that Product Hunt is creating a revolutionary new community that’s dedicated to the discovery of these new ideas. In my opinion, being able to participate in high-level conversations with other like minded people, entrepreneurs and builders is something that’s really exciting. I think that down the road, Product Hunt performance can develop into a metric of success on par with opening weekend box office numbers in the movie industry.

Until then, I can say without hesitation on behalf of the whole SocialSign.in team that we are extremely proud to have been featured on Product Hunt. I want to thank Ryan Hoover and the whole Product Hunt team for helping us on June 10th and beyond.